ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the representative group of poems which suggest that late-nineteenth-century women writers were evolving an erotic that in some ways provides remarkable confirmation for de Feure’s fears. A sort of attenuated and perverted lily, the flower signifies the corruption of female sexual purity to which the woman writer’s fantasy life is also made to attest. Whether employing her hand to write—or to engage in other, even more secretive and solitary activities—in the very substance of her fantasies, this woman stands condemned. The poem concludes on an uplifting moral whose very formulation in pious platitudes stands in striking contrast to the sensuously rich, magnificently ambiguous poetry preceding it. However theoretically sophisticated in itself, Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of de Feure’s painting does little to credit the sophistication of the women writers publishing in the artist’s own period.
